Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds • Hacker News Board

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#181

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

skocznymroczny wrote: post #11

supernova87a wrote: post #2

I remember wondering aloud at MIT/Harvard putting their courses online for free for anyone to listen to, and saying, well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? I guess we're going to find out whether the networking, friends, social aspect is worth it. There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which…

I know this might not be received well by the HN crowd, but I feel like the classes and networking are secondary, the main value of a reputable college is having a reputable college you can put on your résumé.

> "...the main value of a reputable college is having a reputable college you can put on your résumé."

That might be true for software developers but it's certainly not true for any other engineering field, medicine, most sciences, etc. that require labs or other equipment. The university I attended had its own research reactor on-site for its nuclear engineering program.

It's not even really true for software developers at the top end of the spectrum. Sure, if you're entering a software career trajectory where your education is unnecessary (which is most of them these days), then, yes, going to an elite school is a waste. If you plan to be building OSes, programming languages, doing AI/ML, etc, then learning that stuff from people who know where the cutting edge is invaluable.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#182

Post by gumby » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:25 PM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #2

I remember wondering aloud at MIT/Harvard putting their courses online for free for anyone to listen to, and saying, well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? I guess we're going to find out whether the networking, friends, social aspect is worth it. There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which…

When MIT put their course material online (thank you Hal Abelson of SCIP fame) they explicit that weren’t thinking it would substitute for an MIT education but just as a resource for others to use for their own courses. I found it handy when I needed to brush up on my thermo (ironically I hated it when I was in school) to review the current materials (as I’d already taken the course years ago The problem sets were enough)

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#183

Post by gumby » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

yodsanklai wrote: post #59

supernova87a wrote: post #2

I remember wondering aloud at MIT/Harvard putting their courses online for free for anyone to listen to, and saying, well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? I guess we're going to find out whether the networking, friends, social aspect is worth it. There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which…

> well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? You can put on you resume that you were accepted in a selective program, and that you were able to complete it. Besides, the actual lectures are only the tip of the iceberg. If you attend in person, you have to do tons of assignments, labs, exams. You also have tutors and professors that supervise, pressure, grade you. You work in collaboration…

> You can put on you resume that you were accepted in a selective program, and that you were able to complete it.

BTW via Coursera (perhaps only through white label?) you can enroll at some universities and get an ordinary degree (no qualifying language like “online”, join the alumni association etc). So you can get that benefit from some online programs, though perhaps not the top echelon.

Despite that, I agree with you that the realtime meatspace stuff is at least 50% of the value for the higher end schools (say “top” 100, however you define “top”).

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#184

Post by ghaff » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

gumby wrote: post #182

supernova87a wrote: post #2

I remember wondering aloud at MIT/Harvard putting their courses online for free for anyone to listen to, and saying, well what is the value add then of paying to physically go to college? I guess we're going to find out whether the networking, friends, social aspect is worth it. There's also something about the competitive aspect of seeing other people in person do better than you or have better ideas than you. Which…

When MIT put their course material online (thank you Hal Abelson of SCIP fame) they explicit that weren’t thinking it would substitute for an MIT education but just as a resource for others to use for their own courses. I found it handy when I needed to brush up on my thermo (ironically I hated it when I was in school) to review the current materials (as I’d already taken the course years ago The problem sets were en…

Yeah, the original concept of OCW wasn't really as materials directly for "end users" at all. I imagine this also helped sell the concept; "people like our current students aren't even the audience for OCW." Over time, OCW has added more things like video lectures as video became cheaper and more ubiquitous but it never had a stated objective of being a course in a box for students to consume directly.

A lot of people were underwhelmed by OCW early on because they were expecting something a lot more consumable for a self-learner--which led to MOOCs of course.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#185

Post by ghaff » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

supernova87a wrote: post #50

bko wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bryan Kaplan argues that the majority of the value of a reputable college is signaling. > Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom. If you’re looking for that kind of worker—and what employer isn’t?—you’ll make an offer, knowing full well…

This is very true! I believe (don't have a good reference) that companies in the past had more incentive and means to cultivate or train people on the job, and thus, a formal signal of education wasn't as important. (and until 1950s(?), wasn't as available to many) I seem to observe that now many companies generally want to pick the already-developed crop of people who fit the bill to a T, have had education or previ…

Especially in "tech," job tenures are generally shorter than they used to be. It wasn't at all unusual at the big computer companies of the 80s and 90s to have a fairly large group of employees who had worked at a company for a decade or two (or more).

For various reasons, on both the employer and employee side, this has changed a lot especially when you're talking startups--but also companies like Amazon from what I understand. In any case, if the expected tenure of an employee is only a couple of years, it's probably unreasonable in most cases to have a 6-12 month training period during which the employee isn't especially productive.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#186

Post by chadash » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:39 PM UTC

I wouldn't take this as an indicator in general that online classes are good or bad (I'm personally not a fan). I think everyone can agree that the quality of classes is going to go down when you have to stop in-person classes mid-semester with no time to prepare for an online transition. Teaching online is a different style that doesn't necessarily work for every instructor or for every subject for that matter.

At the same time, university is extraordinarily expensive. If you are paying 50K/year and not getting what you paid for, you are going to feel like you are owed something. Add on the fact that many students' parents have lost all or parts of their incomes, or fear that they will going forward, and it would be surprising if we didn't see these lawsuits.

Ultimately, it's going to depend what is in the contracts that were signed. If there's a force majure clause favoring the universities, then the students may not have a case. If not, then yeah, they aren't getting what they paid for and should be entitled to refunds.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#187

Post by neutronicus » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

intended wrote: post #80

skocznymroczny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this might not be received well by the HN crowd, but I feel like the classes and networking are secondary, the main value of a reputable college is having a reputable college you can put on your résumé.

This is the popular view on HN. I take the opposite stance - being in person makes a huge difference, possibly one not appreciated by the demographics here. People continually reduce the experience to “sitting in a box and ingesting information. But a classroom is much more than that - it’s the ability to interact with other students, to deal with real world issues and practice even basic skills like asking questions…

And you aren't even mentioning the case of degree programs that are in some essential sense about learning to use equipment costing in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in some cases whose availability is strictly controlled by the US government.

I got my undergrad in Nuclear Engineering, and I learned to use Gamma Ray Spectrometers costing easily 30,000 dollars and did Plasma Physics experiments in a Vacuum Chamber setup of similar cost, all the while supervised by people who knew how to safely perform experiments with radioactive material and comply with relevant government regulations. And I was mainly about Computational Neutron Transport - I got what was considered a bare-minimum grounding in Experimental Nuclear Science. This is to say nothing of programs with research reactors students can use for experiments (whose ranks my alma mater sadly left just as I arrived).

This was basically true of all the non-CS engineering disciplines. Perhaps one could cobble together an equivalent to a Mechanical Engineering or Civil Engineering degree from my alma mater with CnC Routers at Hackerspaces and the like. But I really can't imagine that working for Nuclear, Aerospace, Biomedical, the Semiconductor side of EE...

Or rather, I can, but it would require an enormous investment into high-fidelity simulation of the relevant equipment. And that is a dangerous road. At the moment, we verify Engineers' ability to use equipment in a very robust way - having them actually use the equipment to perform engineering tasks and measurements. If you rely instead on training simulators you need to be extremely vigilant about their fidelity (and you will almost certainly fall back on minimum duration of instructor-monitored usage of real equipment, like the nuclear and aerospace industries require).

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#188

Post by leetcrew » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

bachmeier wrote: post #174

red_admiral wrote: post #58

If I go into a restaurant and order pork, but get served beef, I have a right as a customer to complain. It doesn't matter whether beef is in some way better than pork, or whether other customers are perfectly happy with beef, or whether I eat beef myself at other times. I order pork, I expect pork. If the restaurant can't serve me pork, for example because they've run out, then the right answer is still not to just…

This argument doesn't really work. It appears that the college students want the credits and they want to finish out the semester, but they want a refund of an arbitrary amount of money. If you order pork and they bring out beef, it's reasonable to not pay for the beef if the restaurant ran out of pork, but it's not reasonable to eat the beef (which costs more) and then demand 40% off the price of pork because it's n…

if you really want to force the restaurant analogy, you could say it's sort of like when the restaurant is having a bad night. the service is really slow and some of the dishes don't come out quite right. if it's just a fluke, a good restaurant will comp most of the meal without you even having to ask.

the problem with this analogy is that a restaurant just isn't very similar to a college. it's really important to a restaurant not to lose a good customer over a single bad experience, and it doesn't cost them much to comp a single meal (it costs even less to give credit towards a future meal). a college doesn't have to care that much about any particular student, but giving refunds causes serious cashflow issues.

that said, I don't think what the students are asking is necessarily unreasonable. if you go to a cheap state school and you're still getting the degree, I'd say you don't have much to complain about. if you're paying $60k for world-class facilities and face time with world-class researchers, I'd say the institution should do at least something to make you whole.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#189

Post by nugget » Mon, May 04, 2020, 2:56 PM UTC

bko wrote: post #32

skocznymroczny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this might not be received well by the HN crowd, but I feel like the classes and networking are secondary, the main value of a reputable college is having a reputable college you can put on your résumé.

Bryan Kaplan argues that the majority of the value of a reputable college is signaling. > Suppose your law firm wants a summer associate. A law student with a doctorate in philosophy from Stanford applies. What do you infer? The applicant is probably brilliant, diligent, and willing to tolerate serious boredom. If you’re looking for that kind of worker—and what employer isn’t?—you’ll make an offer, knowing full well…

A large amount of the value results from signaling but don't underestimate the value in taking a smart, ambitious 18 year old and putting them in a dense concentration of similar, like-minded individuals for 4 very formative years.

Re: Unimpressed by online classes, college students file lawsuits for refunds

#190

Post by quanticle » Mon, May 04, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

intended wrote: post #80

skocznymroczny wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this might not be received well by the HN crowd, but I feel like the classes and networking are secondary, the main value of a reputable college is having a reputable college you can put on your résumé.

This is the popular view on HN. I take the opposite stance - being in person makes a huge difference, possibly one not appreciated by the demographics here. People continually reduce the experience to “sitting in a box and ingesting information. But a classroom is much more than that - it’s the ability to interact with other students, to deal with real world issues and practice even basic skills like asking questions…

Bloom's two-sigma problem is only tangentially related to your argument. What Bloom found was that one-on-one instruction using a very specific type of teaching (Direct Instruction) coupled with mastery-based learning, results in some pretty spectacular gains (at least according to a few, rather underpowered studies).

If anything, the two-sigma problem argues against in-person teaching. Mastery based learning requires that a student prove that they have mastered the current concept before they are allowed to move on to the next concept. That is much easier to do in an online setting, where each student can be presented with customized material, than it is to do in a class of 30-or-so bored undergraduates.